The Devil's Wife, page 8
A blackbird caws in a nearby tree. There’s a taste of vanilla in the air and the two of them feel simultaneously a profundity of such undeniable emotion that the ground beneath them seems to tremble.
Maria crosses her arms and pulls her shirt up, over her head with so much force, two buttons fly off. She grabs at Adam's belt, unbuckling it as he pulls her to him, kissing her neck, her breasts, his hands slipping down into the inside of her jeans, feeling the smoothness of her buttocks, her inner thighs. She wants him inside her, deep inside her, now, right now; as if this is the first time they have found each other after years of looking, as if this is exactly what she needs. She pulls him on top of her and he slips inside, her moan filling him with an ecstasy he hasn’t known before.
The sun reappears, casting a soft, orange light over them as they lie exhausted in each other’s arms. The blackbird caws again, looking on with a wary, knowing eye.
Adam and Maria remain lying there for some time clasped together, silent, gazing up at the statue.
“I think he likes us,” Adam says.
"Or hates us. There is a definite duplicity in his face.”
“No. He's an angel. Look closely at those wings…see? They are all a flutter” He leans over and nibbles her ear. “ We turned that piece of stone on, babe.”
Suddenly Maria’s eyes go cold and still.
“Something just moved.”
“Where?”
“Right around us- I swear I feel like something just slithered right by me- like I was touched by…I don’t know what.”
“That’s my hand on your thigh, hon. You always like how I touch you.”
“ I love how you touch me. Come here.” He turns toward her. “ I love how you touch me,” she repeats and gives him another long kiss.
All is silent in the field around Maria and Adam’s new home. A gentle wind touches the top of the grass, rustling it like it’s the hair of a child. Beneath the smell of fresh cut hay is the faint whiff of decay. In the high grass three large snakes slither towards the cottage. They are pulling something of great weight. In their strong jaws are the ankles of a human corpse, a naked female. Sister Vincent. Gnawing rodents have crisscrossed her breasts. The ridges of her bulging flesh where the blood has coagulated around her chest and head wounds have turned a pinkish gray. Insects have attacked her face and devoured her left eye and half her nose.
Sister Vincent’s body has lost some of its form but not enough to make it unrecognizable. She might even look like a young woman sunning herself- until the snakes linger around her neck, pulling her over and we see her blackened back yanked under the house like a sack of rocks.
Chapter Ten
Julie Cavanaugh is comfortable with her so called obsessions. It is other people- friends, relatives, boyfriends (particularly boyfriends) who simply cannot comprehend a girl who will stay up three nights in a row to watch the northern lights, or travel to India to meet the Dali Lama, or live in a homeless shelter in Manhattan to help those less fortunate. She never asked anyone to follow her to Nigeria to hand out sterile needles to village women. She just did it.
Seven hours have now gone by since the love of her life, Max, has packed his bags and left. She should have seen it coming. He, like the rest of them, had had enough.
The sanitation truck growls outside her window. The plant in the green pot on the sill has seemingly died over night. It used to be orange. Now it’s just a clump of brown sticks. Max had always done all the watering of the plants. Unlike her he knew all their names, understood their wants and needs.
The scent of Max’s earthy cologne wafts up from the empty pillow beside her. She’s reading the opening of Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar for the thousandth time. “ It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenberg’s…”
Max was a Rosenberg- not related to the Rosenberg’s who were executed- But as her mother once said” all these Jews are related, aren’t they? Ask him if he’s a Communist.” As it turns out she is far more of a communist than Max.
She remembers visiting his parents at their summer cabin in the Catskills. Slathering gobs of cream cheese over a bagel brought up from Manhattan. She had looked at the Rosenberg’s around the table, and imagined them all being arrested and electrocuted in the very chairs they sat in.
Julie grew up in Hopewell, New Jersey. It was the town where 70 years before the Lindbergh kidnapping had occurred. It marked a generation of children. As a child her grandmother related in vivid detail; the ladder propped against the second-story window and the empty crib. Her mother still had nightmares of being whisked away in the middle of the night and she seemed more than happy to pass this fear onto her daughter.
Julie however was consumed by Bruno Hauptmann and his execution. She asked her uncle what an electrocution was and he said it was when someone” set your hair on fire.” She knew that reality was different. She knew you sat in a chair, the switch was pulled, a current streamed upward from your toes and erupted in a halo of flames around your head- and you were gone like a candle being snuffed out on a birthday cake-whoosh.
She fingers through the Bell Jar’s pages and thinks of Ethel Rosenberg’s face as she approaches her execution. Ethel’s face becomes her own. Ethel has a strict moral code, and so does Julie, only Julie isn’t political anymore. She gave that up years before. Now all she wants to do is save kids.
She turns to the empty pillow besides her and blurts.
“ Damn it Max, why is saving kids a crime?”
She picks up her cell and punches his number. When the beep sounds after his voice mail greeting, she leaves what is probably her hundredth message.
“ Max come back home. Please. I can’t change who I am. But I love you…come back home, please.”
Their argument began the previous night or maybe it was set in motion three years before when she started her blog: ForeverKidnapped.org
At the time she was working for the New York State Task Force on Child Welfare and Medicaid Fraud. After spending nine months trying to get one child into a foster home where he wouldn’t have his head bashed in for the zillionth time, she came to the conclusion that the foster care system was a mess- broken beyond repair. Everyone was making money off of these kids. Medicaid fraud was rampant. But there was another more horrifying problem- one which was being intentionally shoved out of sight. Every year in the United States 800,000 children went missing. Of that figure 140,000 were not recovered. Eighty thousand, like Lindbergh’s baby, were never seen again.
What happens to these kids?
It’s a question Julie can never seem to shake. And it is solving this question which has become the driving force and motivation for her blog.
Foreverkidnapped.org has steady bloggers in London, Madrid, Angola, Australia and France. They primarily investigate organizations fronting themselves as educators or members of religious groups, who transport children from place to place- frequently to be sold into the open market; to families looking to adopt, or to brothels or simply as slaves. These transactions are performed through an intricate web of bribes and political corruption. Some of these illegal activities are uncovered and brought to light by the heroic investigative work of a hand full of bloggers at foreverkidnapped.org.
Stolen children are commodities- 80,000 every year in the US alone. Kidnapping is big business and Julie knows no one can be trusted; the state social workers, law enforcement, even the religious leaders.
When someone recently sent her an article from the Louden newspaper about an accident where nuns at a local convent had a five year old girl in their possession, Julie took notice. She did some quick investigative work and found that the nun, who died, Sister Francis, had been stopped six months before for running a red light. There had been a 6 year old girl in the car that time also. What were cloistered nuns doing with these young girls?
Julie had spent several weeks trying to make contact with the Sisters of Passion in Louden, New York, but had received no response. Luckily, she knew someone there from her task force days that might be able to help her.
The evening before she was to leave, Max was shocked to see that she was packing to go upstate for a few days.
“ What are you doing? What about Saturday night? We have reservations at Cerro’s. It’s my parents Fiftieth.”
He had seen that face on Julie before, a wilting please-understand-I-have-a-mission-to-perform look.
“ No…no not this time. It’s my parents, for Christ’s sake!”
“ You know I have people who are relying on me, Max. I have someone up there that can help. I don’t know if he’s available another day, another hour. You know how these things are so time sensitive. I’ll be back on Sunday. I promise. Please. Please understand.”
There she was with that quivering voice again, the” please” that had made a home in his ear the last three years- the sweet, supplicating – please. His stomach hurt nearly as much as his heart. What followed was a comatose rage as strange and sudden as sleep walking.
He threw his suitcase on the bed and began packing.
Julie takes the 8:56 AM Amtrak out of Penn Station to Louden. A two hour trip along the Hudson she’s looking forward to. She opens her laptop to catch up with the activities in Madrid. The usual slew of parental kidnappings. The view of the river calms her. Across, on the other side, a wisp of smoke is puffing up from the Palisades. A news helicopter circles the plume like a fly. Always the disasters get all the coverage, Julie thinks. She should call a reporter friend at NBC- give him the heads up on a developing story –“Upstate cloistered nuns steal children.” But she knows this is still just a hunch- she has much work to do on this one.
She reaches for her cell and calls Max to leave yet another message on his voice mail, begging him to come home.
Chapter Eleven
“One thing I can promise you, Adam, after we have completed this project Hollywood will never ignore you again. They will come begging with offers. All the years of slights and condescension are over, my friend.”
Adam sips his wine and gazes contentedly into the raging fire behind Perry Haverford. The large room radiates familial warmth. Adam sits back in his chair as he takes a breath of solitary ease. He thinks once again about how presently in the world of movie making he couldn’t be more obscurely located or disregarded. Soon, very soon, this might all change.
It’s been only four weeks since Adam has started working with Haverford on his new feature- a re-make of his 80’s TV soap hit, Dark Horrors. Haverford has secured a firm commitment from the renowned director, Jonathan Adamo to direct the film.
“ I love this opening speech of Reverend Murford to his congregation.”
“ Are you sure you don’t want to cut it back? I thought maybe it was a tad long.”
“ I wouldn’t cut out a single word, not a minor breath.”
Haverford clears his throat. In his deep resonate voice, noted for the ability to mesmerize and excite, he begins to read out loud from Adam’s first pages.
“ What I want to talk about today is love, God’s love.”
“ Amen,” the congregation responds.
“ That love’s got no end, no bottom, no ceiling. Paul tells us nothing can separate us from the love of God through Jesus. The fact that we are here today is a sign God loves us.”
“ Amen.”
“ The fact that we got a brain to think with, and a tongue to speak with, and a song to sing- I just want to thank Him for waking me up this morning. I want to thank Him for giving me food to eat and a roof over my head. Sometimes we ask Him to work them big miracles, but forget to thank Him for the little ones. But He is a great big God and he never fails us. He’s a good God, isn’t He?”
“ Amen,” the congregation erupts.
Haverford puts down the script. His eyes glaze over.
“ I am so jealous! It just flows from your pen. I can feel it, I can feel it!" He leaps over to Adam's chair and puts his hands around his neck.
"It - Is - So Brilliant!"Haverford squeezes and shakes Adam's neck until he begins to choke.
"Perry … for fucksake … let go, you'll kill the poor dear," Lilith says in a low growl.
Perry opens his hands, and releases Adam's neck, returning to his senses.
“ So sorry my boy, I got carried away. Please understand it is your brilliant writing that raises so many emotions in me. Your writing just thrills me. Thrills me! Listen to this language Lilith. Here’s a preacher who doesn’t exhort or instruct. It’s deep personal stuff coming from the gut.” Haverford quickly turns pages to a section he has marked. “ Forgive me Adam; I’ll just skip to make my point.”
“ My daddy lived till he was ninety. He died in a West Virginia penitentiary where he was serving a life sentence for killing his third wife. My step daddy was a drunk. We moved in with him on Back Fork. I was like a lamb thrown in with a den of lions. I was six and we lived on nothing but parched corn for nine weeks, like rats. We slept on grass beds. We didn’t even have a pinch of salt. Now that is poor.”
“ Amen,” the congregation concurred.
“ By the time I was ten I had seen three men killed in my house. I was afraid to go to sleep at night.”
“ Help him, Jesus,” the congregation implored.
“ I made it to the eighth grade, but when I was just shy of turning thirteen, I got shot in the stomach with a twelve gauge. That was the first time I heard the voice of God.”
“ Praise His Holy name!”
“ There I was holding my insides in my hands. Them things squiggling around. They really colored up funny. Then I thought to myself. I had the awfullest fear come up on me.”
The Reverend paces back and forth, loping and methodical, holding his bible high above him in one hand and looking down as if he were peering into darkness.
“ I saw a vision of my casket lid closing on me, and the voice out of the heavens spoke to me and said, ‘Don’t be afraid, Carl Murford,’cause everything’s gonna be alright’, and I felt that shield of faith just come down on me!”
“ Hallelujah!”The congregation roared.
“ God’s been good to me!” the Reverend retorted.
“ Amen.”
“ He’s been good to me!”
“ Amen.”
“ Doctors told my mama I had maybe 15 minutes to live. Almost all my liver and stomach…shot out. I was on the operating table sixteen, eighteen hours. When I left the hospital I was 79 pounds. But just look at me now!”
“ Praise his name.”
The Reverend stands with his hands clenched to his sides and a wild look in his eyes.
“ He’s been good to me,” he said as he started pacing again.
“ He’s been good to me.”
“ Amen.”
“ I said He’s been good to me.”
“ Amen.”
The Reverend suddenly stops in his tracks. He scans the congregation, his wild eyes opening wide.
“ But I wasn’t always good to Him.”
There’s a long silence as Haverford, profoundly moved, places the script in his lap, and gazes at the fire.
“And in the next 50 pages we watch as the righteous Reverend Murford goes from extolling God’s love to becoming the Devil’s disciple.” Haverford looks briefly at the script again, fondly leafing through its pages. “ It’s brilliant like the Tempest, except without all the bullshit.”
A thin red bruise has formed around Adam’s neck. He does not even feel it. He could care less. He glances over to Lilith, her eyes, a deep dark violet, are looking back at him. He quickly averts his own eyes, but the indelible after image persists, floating in his mind as he gazes into the fireplace- those dusky, knowing eyes of a film goddess- eyes that have pierced the hearts of a generation of movie goers.
“Well, my dear," Haverford announces to his wife,” I think I would like to ask Adam if he would consider directing our film.”
A wave of heat instantly rushes through Adam's body; he turns back to Lilith. Her smile withholds nothing, her lips spread wide revealing her perfect white teeth, her nostrils flare like a horse at full gallop.
“ I was just thinking the same thing,” Lilith says in her throaty whisper.
A cool breeze whisks through the room and Adam thinks he hears an owl screech or maybe it’s a distant cry. Haverford turns back to his wife- they gaze into each other’s eyes then burst into laughter.
Adam nods politely and smiles at the joke- of course there was no way Haverford was truly considering him as his director. Certainly not when he already has a firm commitment from the famous Jonathan Adamo.
“Funny,” Adam says tightening his jaw.
“So you’ll do it?” Haverford asks.
“This isn’t a joke?”
“No, my dear friend. We are laughing because we cannot believe we have found you. I think…and I speak for Lilith as well…that you have the makings of a top rate director, as well as a writer. We would be honored if your first major project could be Dark Horrors.”
Haverford reaches into the vest pocket of his corduroy jacket and pulls out a folded piece of paper.
“Here’s something…a check…and don’t think that this gesture on my part isn’t a bit selfish…I truly wish to lock up your talents for the foreseeable future. You know this industry of ours is made up of mostly despicable, management types who will blow air up your ass as long as they can before they actually commit to real dollars and cents. So, this is my way of saying our relationship will be nothing of the kind. It’s a little something, before we actually bang out the contract.”
Adam takes the folded check without looking at the sum and puts it in his jacket pocket.
So this is it, Adam thinks. The precise moment I have been waiting for, the moment I have dreamed about my entire adult life.
“I think it is fitting that we toast our partnership with this year’s first holy wine.” Haverford holds out an empty long stemmed wineglass.” We just got this batch back from the bottler and I have yet to taste it.”
